Adrian:
I concur with Elize here. In addition, I regret that many Obama opponents make themselves easy targets for articulate liberals with use of over-the-top language. Nevertheless, their anger is justified. One thing I think is a problem in the debate about Obama’s belief system is that we’re not keeping the discussion within the American context. Within the context of what a majority of modern Americans expect as far as our governance goes, Obama’s behavior and policies are alarming. He doesn’t have to be a “Marxist” or a European-style socialist, or Hugo Chavez for his policies to be egregious by American standards and expectations. Adrian, you, in effect, argue that “he’s not that bad,” by dismissing the alarmism, but beneath the alarmist rhetoric is a genuine kernel of truth: Obama is violating the most basic tenets of the American system of governance. He’s not the first one to do so, but rather, he’s ratcheting up and speeding up the process of America’s governing class’s drift away from Constitutional government. Keep in mind, Adrian, that America’s founders were also quick to complain about transgressions that most people of the 18th-century western world would have found to be “no big deal.” Had those 18th-century Tea Partiers not been so quickly and easily offended and alarmed about a “mere trifle of a Tea Tax,” or an “innocuous” Stamp Act, or a “Boston Massacre” that wasn’t particularly bloody or major, then we today would only be the southernmost part of Canada.
